STOREY

A self-deployable unit, [storey] empowers children to become authors of the spaces they inhabit by allowing them to curate a common setting – lunchtime – and to re-design the act and space of eating.

The user will open [storey], disguised as a textbook, to find tools such as a magnifying glass (with a book reading/pathfinding light), a surface scratcher “pen”, earplugs, wayfinding map, (among others). A strategically designed section contains place setting for their lunch + condiments to host a pret-a-porter eating experience.

Upon meal completion [storey] can be locked up for safety and carried in the user’s arms or in their backpack without appearing conspicuous. Book and keys can be given to a close accomplice for two or more users to share their [storey]s.

This project aims to encourage collective territorialization (and perhaps privatization) of spaces in schools by giving children the functional and emotional stability to breakaway from the uniform and preset scripts of eating lunch as a public, synchronized, and place-specific experience.

WRKSHP 2014 Fellow: Reina Imagawa

ARMADILLO PLAYMAT

Armadillo is a playmat prototype designed to stimulate various exploration strategies in children helping them to build their spatial reasoning skills. The playmat provides an open environment in which the child gets to be the author of his or her play narrative. Its form is a 38-celled collapsoid, but at the same time could be a crocodile, a castle, a chair, or a treasure chest for your favorite toys.

Designed to encourage child-directed, unstructured free play, and has proven to stimulate the following exploration strategies:

+Transporting

+Color Recognition and Pattern Finding

+Inventing

+Storing and Locating

+Tossing

+Interacting and Social Play

+Resting and Seating

Armadillo is a flexible tool that catalyzes invention, ideation, and exploration, contrary to what a rigid play environment would do. It is a prototype with modifiable rules that promotes original ideas, creation of new games, creation of stories, problem solving, and construction of something distinctive out of common shapes and forms.

Armadillo gives children the opportunity to learn through active play and the tools to become creative innovators in the future.